ROAM Planet rendering

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DavlexDesign
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,
Jabberwocky wrote:For a "cheap trick", the atmosphere is looking very good!
lol, thank's mate, I will explain how I did it if anyone is interested.
Zonder wrote:I was wondering what mars atmosphere looks like in similar distances and wikipedia had one
Yeah, that looks ok, a little too much colour enhancement I think, but I could make my Atmosphere red like that, just by biasing it.....
Here we go with a color bias towards red.
Here we go with a color bias towards red.
And here it is inside the atmosphere.
And here it is inside the atmosphere.
As you can see here, color is not a real problem, I'm setting it all up to be properly parameterized, so it will be adjustable live, I haven't got enough buttons on the keyboard to control and tune this thing now.
So I will have a UI setup shortly, so I can save out and load good planet configurations via a serialization thingy.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Zonder »

Yeah I have a feeling they have enhanced the colour on that image. Seems too red did try and fine something on the nasa site had no luck though
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,

I've been mucking around again, but this time with the planet wide clouds ....
From Far out in space.
From Far out in space.
Closer in.
Closer in.
And getting closer.
And getting closer.
They are starting to look volumetric, I still have a ways to go with the closer up details, but they seem to be getting there, and not cost the Earth to render.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again,

Here we are on the ground at Baal, looking back up at the clouds this time ...
CloudsVolume04.jpg
CloudsVolume05.jpg
They don't look too bad, but it's the fly through and stuff I have to work on, and that will give a better look also from above and below the clouds.
I know the edges are a bit too soft and stuff, but these shots are early days, I'm working on it.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

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G'day again,

This time I have them lit from above better, and the transparency is all fixed up ....
These are lit from above where the sun is comming from now.
These are lit from above where the sun is comming from now.
You will probably already have noticed too, that the Gas giant that Baal is orbiting can be seen through the clouds also.
OH yeah, these clouds are now about 1.5 km thick in parts too, I will gradually get them up to around 4 km in parts, just getting my head around the rendering of volumetrics on a grand scale.

Still plugging away guys.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

And Again,

Sorry guys, but now the volumes are really starting to take shape ...
You can see the volume better in this shot of the clouds.
You can see the volume better in this shot of the clouds.
These clouds are still around 1.5 km thick, but I have managed to speed up the rendering, so I should be able to go higher now.

EDIT: I have re leveled this image so that you can see it better, I got into work and noticed that it was all washed out looking, and couldn't see the clouds at all, except for a big white glow, you guys must think I'm nuts uploading something like that. On my monitor at home it looked great, especially while it is running live, there is some kind of loss in definition when it gets converted to png. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, and the values I'm sending to screen are in the HDR range or something. The previous shots worked fine, it's just this last shot. I don't get it.

Anyone got any ideas why ?


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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by aguru »

Not really, no. Could it be that we are "in" the clouds, making eveything more white?

All I can say is that this is really starting to look incredible. :shock: Keep up your screenshot rampage!
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,

Trying something new with my clouds system here, you know that look that I said I wanted to achieve ....
Nasa Photo of the clouds over Earth.
Nasa Photo of the clouds over Earth.
Well, I've been toying around with my Volume data idea, to see if I can get those kind of 3D pillar formations, without it costing the Earth in ram and processing speed.
Well, here's what I've come up with so far ....
This is a debug view of the volume data in engine.
This is a debug view of the volume data in engine.
And here's a closer look at the data as the player comes closer to the clouds ....
Closer view of the cloud data.
Closer view of the cloud data.
I know it looks silly right now, but when I finish this shader thingy and get it filling in what I need, I think it will be nice to fly through and around too.
For the moment, look at that reference shot above, and use your imagination as to how the data view will probably look, maybe not as refined as that, but damn close.


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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again,

Here is what the data looks like at the moment from the ground ....
Looking up from groundlevel.
Looking up from groundlevel.
At another spot on the planets surface.
At another spot on the planets surface.
I know it looks strange like this, but if you use your imagination a little, you can get the idea of HOPEFULLY !!! what it will look like.
And if you look at the fps while on the ground, I still have plenty of time up my sleeve to make it look right and maintain a reasonable frame rate.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by ultramedia »

Wow Alex, that looks freakishly cool :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Jabberwocky »

Just a couple thoughts on the clouds. This may be pretty obvious stuff, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
(Assuming you're drawing the clouds on a stack of planes/billboards here.)

Too many large, overlapping, transparent renderables can be a performance killer as you start hitting the fill rate and overdraw limits of your card. This will be most noticeable in high resolution settings. So you might want to crank that up to max while doing your performance testing for this stuff.

One problem you may notice when flying through the cloud layers is that you get an ugly flickering as you pass through each layer. One pretty low-tech trick to solve this is to increase the transparency as the camera approaches the layer, so that it is fully transparent by the time the camera passes through.
Image
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,
ultramedia wrote:Wow Alex, that looks freakishly cool
Thank's mate, much appreciated.
Jabberwocky wrote:(Assuming you're drawing the clouds on a stack of planes/billboards here.)
I'm not using a stack of billboards mate, that would use a crazy amount of GPU RAM, this runs off of 1 .tga image, with normals in the rgb channels, and the height in the alpha layer, so a 32 bit 2048 x 1024 image.
With that I extrapolate all the data per layer in the cheapest way I can.

Here's a pic from my personal machine ...
Clouds shaded a little better, from on the ground.
Clouds shaded a little better, from on the ground.
This is at 1680 x 1050 (as big as my screen permits), with a Nvidia GTX 450 video card, and an I5 cpu.
It still runs OK at this res I think, but it does hit a little hard on the fps at this res.
The drawing of the clouds at the moment isn't really setup properly yet, I have some really different ideas for that one, I'm just experimenting with numbers at the moment to see what happens.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day again,

Here's another shot, at 1280x720, so there is a reasonable frame hit at the higher resolution, Good advice by Jabberwocky, to keep an eye on that stuff, thanks mate.
Another shot at a lower resolution.
Another shot at a lower resolution.
This one looks further into the horizon, to see how the lighting and volume show up at a different sun position in the sky.

I got so use to running it at 1280x720, I didn't even think to check it at a higher resolution.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Zonder »

yeah these days you want to be targeting highres like 1080p.

Looking good :)
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,

I've been toying around, and trying to cheapen up the shaders a little, especially on the terrain side of things, and I have achieved that pretty much, gained about 20 - 50 fps on the terrain side of things, with a slight improvement in quality to boot. The reason for this is to cater for the cloud rendering as well, I've managed to get it going ok, but the shader isn't giving me the results I want.....
Around 2000 square km Cloud formation.
Around 2000 square km Cloud formation.
It's not looking too bad from out this far, but they break down when you get close. I'm going to see if I can reduce the overdraw problem that Jabberwocky was talking about, and move to a screen space render system for these clouds I think. Still trying to nut out a cheap way to render this stuff fast, but still look nicer than what they do now. I can see the potential of them, when you fly around the planet, and you see where the pillars and thunderheads are supposed to be, coming over the horizon, it will look great once I've nutted it all out, but it is a tough one. I've had a look at some options out there, but none are going to handle 2000+ square km of them, and on some of the more nicer looking cloud stuff http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Membres/Eric.Bruneton/, 10 - 20 fps for one small cloud just won't cut with me, I need this thing to be realtime, or it's no good for anyone.

The problem I'm having is the way I have to produce these things, these clouds you see are generated from 1 grey scale image, actually only the alpha channel of that image, the reason for this is that I will be generating these clouds out of a dynamic flow simulation, so they have to self perpetuate, These clouds are designed to be fully procedural in nature, that's the only way I want to do these things, to keep it in the theme of this simulation that started so long ago. I will solve the issues I'm having, but my lack of expertise with shaders and that, is what is making it interesting.

Anyway, I LOVE A CHALLENGE !!!!

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

I almost forgot,

Here's a shot from the ground too, also showing the terrain with the cheaper shader working ....
A shot from the ground.
A shot from the ground.
As you can see, they don't look too bad, but I still have a long ways to go.

OH yes, Jabberwocky, I am keeping an eye on overfill and stuff like that mate.

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by azer89 »

hi, you've done a great work, i would like to know if you provide us source code or not
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,
azer89 wrote: i would like to know if you provide us source code or not
I think our thinking it is still following these lines
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... &start=350

I've been dicking around with the atmospherics again, I know, I know, nothing really new here, but I needed to get the atmospherics right, so that I can then get the correct lighting on everything else, so I thought I'd try and get Mie and Rayleigh calculations in there, that are not ratio bound. I'm still working on it, but here is how it is looking so far.....
with Green sort of normal coloring.
with Green sort of normal coloring.
And here on a barron Mars type planet.
And here on a barron Mars type planet.
The red Mars type planet has a thicker atmosphere that is biased towards a redder atmosphere, where the other one is thinner, more like our very own atmosphere, I have set this thing up so you can color bias the daytime shy to what ever you like, and also the sunset/rise to whatever you like, that way I can setup parameters for different atmospheric make ups (more acidic atmospheres or stuff like that). You can also adjust the depth of the atmosphere, the transparency fall off, the amount of carry / transmittance of light past the horizon of the planet, all that sort of guff too. I'm trying to make it easy and also modifiable for the artist / creator of their planet. I don't know, all this sort of stuff will probably be necessary later on to ease the workload of artists and level designers I suppose.

"Jabberwocky" : I tried it out at 1080p res, and it still drops about 100 fps on my machine, but still, 250fps + at 1080p is OK. I've still yet to vectorize the shaders up to optimize them, but they are holding their own.

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by palaslet »

WOW!!!
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Jabberwocky »

That looks really nice.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,

Thank's for the nice remarks.

Here's a couple of shots of the planet (Mars Looking) from close orbit to way out, so you can see the atmosphere from space ...
From almost atmosphere height
From almost atmosphere height
From high orbit
From high orbit
And finally a full shot of the planet.
And finally a full shot of the planet.
The reason I'm not showing the planet with water and clouds is because I'm still working on those systems, I will be integrating this new sky / atmospherics subroutine into a NEW water shader (the old one looks crap with this atmosphere running) and also the NEW clouds shader. So bare with me for a bit, while I nut out some of this stuff.
The reason I called the atmospherics a subroutine, is because that is exactly what it is, it runs cheap enough to allow me to use it as a spherical lighting system, On the sky sphere, I call it per pixel, and on the Terrain, I call it per vertex, and it works a treat, so when I add in more and more bits on the surface, I can use it to call per vertex the lighting that is hitting it from the sky at any angle. It just makes sense to me, that if I want to have everything in scene look like they are actually in the scene, that they should all be lit from the same routine. I will be using this for my grass and foliage systems too, nearly there with this one too.
Pandora Here we come ...

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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by LordBaal »

Jawdropping work!
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day guys,

Thanks for the positive comment LordBaal, much appreciated.

This is for JabberWocky ....
Here it is running at 1080p resolution.
Here it is running at 1080p resolution.
This shot shows the engine running at 1920 x 1080p Full Screen on my sons I7 CPU powered PC.
I'll upload a few with real clouds and ocean shaders soon (I HOPE).

Alex
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by Ouacaze »

Hi, you're doing some nice work here :)

Speaking about clouds, Flightgear (which is an open source project) as nice 3d clouds, as you can see
here http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewto ... 55#p154723
and here http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewto ... 70#p154977
and also here http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewto ... start=1125

Maybe you could have a look at the techniques they're using.
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Re: ROAM Planet rendering

Post by DavlexDesign »

G'day Ouacaze,

Yeah those pics are pretty nice, I haven't heard of Flightgear before, so I will definitely look at that.

I have something in mind I will try first, before I resort to pilfering someone else's ideas, I want to see if my idea works first, if it does, It shouldn't have much of a frame hit at all, and still have full volumetric planetary cloud layers, it's to do with something I came across while working/experimenting on the atmospherics that woke me up to this idea.
Due to my inexperience with the intricacies of shader development, I had some pretty weird and wonderful things showing up on screen, and one of those weird things actually opened up a whole new can of worms for me. I've already started on the framework for this new idea, so I will see if it is gonna be another failure to put in the junk draw, or another success for inclusion. My junk draw is getting pretty full by the way.

alex
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